Gregory Lasak

Gregory Lasak was a justice of the 11th Judicial District Supreme Court in Queens County, New York from 2004 to 14 September 2018. A Democrat, he ran in the party primary for the Queens district attorney election in 2019, but he lost with just 14.5% of the vote to Tiffany Caban's 39.6%.

Biography
Gregory Lasak was born in Woodside, Queens, New York City to a Polish-American family, the son of a mechanic and a homemaker. Fresh out of law school, Greg joined the Office of the Queens District Attorney and quickly rose up the prosecutorial ranks. At the age of 30, he was appointed Chief of the Homicide Bureau and then made Executive Assistant in charge of the Major Crimes Division. He created and supervised the first bureau devoted specifically to crimes of domestic violence, and he spent countless hours as the legal adviser at crime scenes. In this role, he supervised the investigation of more than 2,500 murder cases and prosecuted cop killers and the likes of the perpetrators of the Wendy's Massacre and the College Point Massacre, the largest mass murder in Queens history. He also prosecuted five police officers indicted for using a stun gun to torture suspects in a police precinct, and his efforts to right wrongful imprisonments eventually led to the release of almost two dozen men from prison and prompted Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, an early leader in the fight for progressive reform of the legal system.

In 2003, Lasak was elected as a New York State Supreme Court Justice, and his first court assignment was to Queens' Drug Treatment Court where, long before it became popular, he diverted low-level, non-violent offenders to treatment programs. Eventually, he rose to become Deputy Administrative Judge of the Queens State Supreme Court and sat for many years in the homicide part, overseeing some of the county's most high-profile cases, including the trials of Demetrius Blackwell, who was convicted of murder for shooting NYPD policeman Brian Moore, and Oscar Morel, who was found guilty of murdering Imam Maulana Akonjee. Greg completed a 14-year term and was re-elected in 2017 for a second 14-year term before stepping down in September 2018 to launch his campaign for Queens District Attorney. He lost in the party primary on 25 June 2019, placing third with 14.5% of the vote. However, the Republican Party candidate Daniel Kogan, who had almost no campaign money, offered to let Lasak take his place as the Republican nominee, and many of Melinda Katz's voters also supported Lasak because of their fear of Democratic nominee Tiffany Caban's radical reform program.